Lenovo's IdeaTab tablets haven't been wildly popular here in the US, though they're strong overseas. They've been low to midrange products with feel unique features. That's changed with the Lenovo IdeaTab S2110. Like the Asus Transformer line of Android tablets and upcoming Windows 8 tablets, the S2110 is available with a keyboard dock that turns the 10.1" slate into a small laptop substitute.

The IdeaTab S2110 runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus CPU. That's a very fast CPU with Adreno 225 graphics and it benchmarks as well as the Tegra 3 in many tests. It managed a 5021 in Quadrant and 49 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Classic test. Why the Qualcomm rather than Tegra 3? Because the S2110 is available with optional 3G, and Qualcomm integrates their CPUs and wireless radios easily.

The tablet has a 10.1" IPS display with 420 nits of brightness. This is a very nice display that has rich colors, wide viewing angles and sharp text. The resolution is 1280 x 800, so you full HD fans will have to look elsewhere. The 16 gig model starts at $429 ($549 when bundled with the keyboard dock), and a 32 gig version costs $50 more. Lenovo often has sales, so you might be able to grab it for less.

The S2110 has a front video chat camera, rear 5MP camera with LED flash and the 3G version has a GPS (the GPS is not enabled on the WiFi only model, so it will use WiFi triangulation for location as does the WiFi iPad). The tablet is very slim and it weighs just 1.3 pounds.

The keyboard dock is superb: the typing experience is as good as it gets for a 10.1" keyboard. Tactile feedback and key travel are good: Lenovo knows how to make keyboards thanks to the ThinkPad heritage. The dock has a secondary battery that doubles runtimes (Lenovo claims 18-20 hours with the dock) and it has two full size USB 2.0 ports that support USB peripherals including portable hard drives (ExtFAT, NTFS and FAT32). We like the sturdy design and tablet mount point that doesn't put undue pressure on the tablet's glass as do Asus' Transformer docks.